The impact of value added and energy consumption intensity on environmental pollutions from agricultural sector: application of panel auto-regressive distribution lag (Panel ARDL)

This study aimed at investigating the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation in agricultural sector among provinces of Iran. Thus, the value added generated by the agricultural sector was utilized as the index of economic growth and Carbon Dioxide emission from the agricultural sector as the environmental degradation index; then, a panel data of 24 provinces of the country over 1990 to 2014 was obtained from statistical center of Iran. The panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model was employed to study the causal relationship between variables of the model; also, the panel autoregressive distributed lag (Panel ARDL) was used for estimating the model. Empirical results of the study revealed that there was a unidirectional relationship from agricultural value added and energy consumption intensity to agricultural Carbon Dioxide emission. In addition, the relationship between agricultural Carbon Dioxide emission and the agricultural growth was found N-shaped and statistically significant. Moreover, the results indicated that a relative increase in agricultural energy consumption intensity positively affected the Carbon Dioxide emission. As a result, future policies in the agricultural sector should involve appropriate plans for the conservation of environmental and natural resource of the country.